Grease Luddite
by eisceire
Summary: Alek finds himself in trouble in a strange city - he should never have trusted Deryn to fix his walker.


_Seems that we have an active plagiarist on Fan Fic Net robbing off fic from Deviantart net. I've a crop of fics on Devi. They're all done as story-per-day; some for Dalekweek &amp; some not but all done with a superfast pen &amp; no sense of sanity. They're getting posted over here as a safeguard; so any of my Lev Fics on Devi pre twenty-fifteen are likely gonna be repeats of Fan Fic Net. Just a hint in case you decide to visit me over there._

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Originally Titled — India

After all of their adventures, all the riotousness and revolution, the revelations and reinstatements that had so transformed the lives of both himself and of Deryn ... Alek betimes caught himself imagining himself as being an entirely new person. Deryn had taught him and transformed him in so many ways; fraught as his life was at this moment he scarcely knew what he would have done as his Walker had seized up in the middle of a local procession. The delights of being enclosed, exposed and excorciated by the antagonistic assemblage of natives who had assailed him left him abashed and aggrieved … it took every vestige of the vocabulary that he'd derived from Deryn to do justice to the situation.

Clanking, clattering and cursing all the way ... he somehow nursemaided the stricken Walker through the crowd to the sanctuary of the engineering sheds. A more anomalous position could not be imagined: with the Austrian, Clanker Empire being given more consideration these days (even if it was given grudgingly at grass roots). The upshot of the upheaval in the minds of the ministerial mandarins inLondon was that trial enclaves of Austrian-Clanker technology were springing up all across the British Empire. Both sides (British and Austrian as much as Darwin and Clanker) wanted to see if the fusion that had been achieved with the Leviathan could be successful on a larger scale and lead to the two cultures merging at every possible level. That was why Alek and Deryn were here in India with a small stable of Walkers, to test the waters and for Alek to put the machines through their paces in such an entirely alien environment.

It simply was not working though, as Alek expostulated to Deryn; in their private quarters and in one of their more private moments. While she was lathering away the sweat and grime that caked him after a day at the saunters, he was unburdening his mind to her also. He was overwhelmingly glad that she was here with him, there was nothing like her hands (and certain other bodily parts) to soothe away the tensions of his body and nothing like her mind to ease his brainache. Certainly she had little more love for Clanker technology now than what she had held when he'd first met her; yet she had such an immensity of love for him that she'd tackle anything for his sake. It was more than enough, to give her the encouragement to ensure that she'd educate herself about the technology that absorbed him,to drive her to train herself up to be a fit sounding board for her Alek. She quickly honed the problem to the essentials.

"You need a different grease, the stuff you Clankers use in the chilly mountains just boils away here. Leave it to me ... I'll find you some thicker stuff; something that makes a decent lubricant when it heats up."

Alek didn't even trouble to leave the office the next morning; he took a chance to catch up on the interminable paperwork, entirely confident that his liebchen would have the Walker walking soon enough. Indeed, long before the heat of the day wore off, she was dragging him off to his pet Walker and assuring him that, even if she'd had to improvise a wee bit, this would work. He was used to the Walkers in this climate starting well then tailing off; so he was chagrined to find that this time the Walker was sluggish even to to begin with. That was no more than a peeve though and soon his engineer's brain came to percieve that, whatever Deryn had replaced the standard lubricant with, it would have to be dense initially then thin down as the heat percolated. It was the only mechanical method that made any sense.

True enough, as the stifling climate began to make itself felt, the Walker eased into action; operating as fluidly as it ever had in his homelands. For the very first time, here in this land, Alek was enjoying his pilotage of the walker; he luxuriated in the welcome return of the familiar feel of a Walker in motion and revelled in the responsiveness that had returned to it. Perhaps the only fly in the ointment, or the cow rather, was the way that the Walker seemed to be attracting the attention of every holy bovine in the district. He couldn't catch a sight of them, so they had to be crowding into the blind spot behind the Walker, but he surely could smell them. The beefy scent was growing stronger by the moment: at first unpleasant, then uncomfortable, then overpowering and finally intolerable. Eventually he had to bring the Walker to a juddering and exasperated halt, as he turned to Deryn: "Liebchen you've done wonders but if we don't get rid of the cattle behind us, I'm afraid we're just going to become a laughing stock."

Deryn returned his gaze, with a most uncharacteristically embarrassed expression, as she explained:

"Ach there's no beasties, I used this for grease."

She held out a large, red, canister labelled — Bovril.

A/N «» The original Bovril is a Real World (sworntruth) beef-based, semi-solid, food extract. Yep it was around long before the Leviathan ever got off the ground.


End file.
